By RUSTY DENNEN

CAMP SHELBY, Miss.--Before he joined the National Guard, Sean Evans was working two jobs, with no clear idea where he was headed in life.

Evans, 18, had an earring, body piercings. He loved skateboarding and hard-core metal music.

"I grew up in California and moved to Virginia to continue high school," he said during the his final week of training before shipping out to the Middle East.

One night he was working a late shift at Sheetz in Opal in Fauquier County when Capt. James Tierney, commander of the Delta Company, 3rd Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment, and another soldier, walked in.

Tierney "told me about the National Guard, and gave me a card," Evans recalled, sitting in a Humvee in the Mississippi heat.

"I was thinking about the college money," the potential for adventure, he admitted, and combat. "I thought, 'Yeah!' That would be bad-ass.'"

A recruiter called and soon he was in basic training, then a private assigned to Delta Company's 3rd Platoon, based at Fredericksburg Armory.

He smiled, "A day and a half after I finished [basic], we were mobilized."

He was among 300 men and women who left Fredericksburg on June 26. There are 115 men in Delta Company.

"I was the youngest private out of [basic] school," he says.

Though his transition from civilian to solder has taken less than a year, his life has changed dramatically.

"I did a big 180-degree turnaround," he said.

He hasn't seen his girlfriend, Brandy, in eight months.

"I'm flying to California to see her," during a week of leave before deployment. He's disappointed they won't be in Iraq--their mission is guarding a seaport in Kuwait, a relatively safe assignment. Still, she worries about him, he says.

"She's like, 'Come back in one piece.'"

MILITARY LINEAGE

Military blood flows through Spc. Jermany Ashton's veins. Ashton, 25, of Flat Iron Corner in Westmoreland County, is short, wiry and strong, with a ready smile.

He checked off the military lineage in his family on his fingers, "There was my grandfather, Eddie Ashton, my cousin, Eva Hackett, my aunt, Dorothy Elmor"

He laughed, "There's a whole lot more on my father's side, 15 or 20 more."